For her, it’s a curious utopia-until she enters her mid-30s. The thoroughly scripted interactions required in the store allow her to pass as “a normal cog in society” for half her life. Keiko Furukura is a part-time employee at a Smile Mart in Tokyo, and she is an unsettling blend of gung-ho about her job and coolly detached from the larger world she inhabits. Following its success, Murata had quit the line of work she shared with the first-person narrator of that slim volume. “I can test things that are not possible in the real world.” Her tenth novel, Convenience Store Woman, had by then sold almost 600,000 copies in Japan, and was her first to be translated into English (by Ginny Tapley Takemori). “I want to use the form of the novel to conduct experiments,” the Japanese writer Sayaka Murata explained as she emerged into the international literary spotlight in 2018.
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